Professor Pamela Clemit, MA, MPhil, DPhil (Oxford)

Professor of English

Profile

I took my undergraduate degree and my M. Phil. at Mansfield College, Oxford, and my D. Phil. at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. My doctoral research, supervised by Marilyn Butler and Paul Hamilton, was on the novels of William Godwin and his followers, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Godwin’s daughter), and Edward Lytton Bulwer. I spent twenty-five years at Durham University, where I was successively Lecturer, Reader, and Professor. In 1999-2000 I was a member of the inaugural class of Fellows at the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers (directed by Peter Gay). I have held a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2007-10), and I am the recipient of the Keats-Shelley Association of America Distinguished Scholar Award for 2017. I arrived at Queen Mary in 2015.

Undergraduate Teaching

Research

Research Interests:

The Godwin-Shelley family of writers (Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and Percy Bysshe Shelley), their associates and heirs

The 1790s

The literature of English religious nonconformity

Letters, journals, and autobiographical writings of the late 18th and early 19th centuries

Editing and editorial theory

The political novel

Recent and On-Going Research

My work is mainly devoted to the two generations of writers and intellectuals influenced by the French Revolution in Britain. I am interested in studying literature alongside history, politics, and philosophy. My principal research project is the Oxford University Press edition of William Godwin's letters, which is being published in six volumes. Godwin knew or corresponded with just about everyone of note on the political left from the era of the French Revolution to the Great Reform Act of 1832: writers, artists, actors, political reformers, journalists, and publishers. The edition is providing authoritative, fully annotated texts of all known surviving letters from Godwin and a selection of previously unpublished letters to him. It will eventually include about 1500 items, of which only a quarter has been published before. Two volumes have been published so far.

I continue to research and publish in other areas of interest. These include the 1790s, the Mary Wollstonecraft diaspora, and the political novel. A relatively new departure is critical study of the letters and journals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, broadly conceived.

David O’Shaughnessy, ‘Theatrical Discourse in the Writings of William Godwin, 1790-1807’ (University of Oxford, 2007).

Public Engagement

2017-current: I am leading a collaborative project with the Victoria and Albert Museum and Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities to digitize the sole surviving manuscripts of William Godwin’s Political Justice and Caleb Williams, and to make them freely available on The Shelley-Godwin Archive. This electronic resource is making freely available the digitised manuscripts of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley, reuniting online the handwritten legacy of one of England’s most important literary families. To find out more about the project, click here.

2015-current: I am engaged in a collaboration with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, under the general editorship of Professor Sir David Cannadine, to bring new information about Godwin and his correspondence networks to a wider readership, redefining our sense of the national narrative. So far I have co-authored (with Jenny McAuley) eight new and replacement entries (currently in press) on figures brought to light by my scholarly annotations in the first two volumes of The Letters of William Godwin.

My work regularly appears in publications for a general audience. Recent pieces include: